Meeting Abstract
Animals display an amazing diversity of colors. These colors are used for a variety of behavioral functions, such as mate attraction, predator avoidance, or camouflage. Reconstructing the evolutionary history of animal coloration is important for understanding how and why coloration evolves. These studies combined with knowledge of a taxon’s natural history (e.g. habitat, range size) can shed light on how various environmental, geographical, or other natural/sexual selection forces influence the evolution of coloration. In addition to evaluating how external factors impact the evolution of color, it is also important to understand how internal factors, such as color production mechanisms or evolutionary linkages between multiple color patches/patterns influence the evolution of animal coloration. Using the Handbook of the Birds of the World and a recently published phylogeny, we performed ancestral state reconstructions to explore how a diversity of colors evolved across 250+ hummingbird species (family: Trochilidae). We reconstructed the evolutionary history of multiple color patches for each species. We then explored how both external and internal selection factors shape the evolutionary history of coloration in this group, and discuss what impacts these patterns of color evolution have on hummingbird natural history.
